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Think Global, Think Local: Critical Regionalism and Landscape Architecture
JACKY BOWRING AND SIMON SWAFFIELD
IS ISSUE OF Landwcape Review is one of four volumes of the proceedings of
"CELA 2004 Here or There? The Global and the Local", the annual conference
of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture held at Lincoln University,
Canterbury New Zealand, 25-29 June 2004. The issue comprises the eight plenary
papers presented at the conference, six of which are published as full double-blind
peer review articles, and the remaining two as reports. This editorial summarises
the main arguments from the opening presentation, which set the agenda for the
conference, and establishes the context within which the plenary papers were
selected and presented. We have also taken the opportunity to make some
observations about contemporary pressures on the discipline of landscape
architecture, and to offer some suggestions about directions in which the discipline
might move in addressing the interrelationship between the global and the local.
HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE: GLOBALlSATION AND CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPES
Although the setting for this discussion is framed by traditional protocols of
scholarship, awareness of the effects of globalisation now extends from the pages
of academic journals into the mainstream of contemporary culture. The dramatic
rate of innovation and use of information technology over the past two decades
has transformed the sense of space, place and identity for hundreds of millions
of people worldwide, as the 'Information Superhighway' has bypassed the 'Global
Village' and headed straight for the 'World City', a parallel digital world of
virtual supermarkets, Amazon.com, virtual cemeteries and memorials. Everything
appears to be out there in cyberspace. The realm of 'total flow' engulfs the
individual, the locale and the region, and people often find themselves more
'connected' to other people in other places on the globe than they are to their
neighbours and local environment. As the theorist Manuel Castells has put it:
"Space and time, the material foundations of human experience, have been
transformed, as the space of flows dominate the space of places, and timeless
time supersedes the clock time of the industrial era" (Castells, 2000). Computer technologies not only form the shape of contemporary culture in
a pragmatic sense, particularly through the digital media, but they also shape our
vision metaphorically. Just as the metaphor of the machine once informed western
cultural understanding of the world, so today computer analogies are becoming
naturalised as models for design, planning, and indeed life itself. MVRDV's
LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2) PAGES 1-12
Jacky Bowring is Senior Lecturer,
Landscape Architecture Group,
PO Box 84, Lincoln University,
Canterbury, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Telephone: +64-3-325-3804
Fax: +64-3-325-3854
Email: bowringj@lincoln.ac.nz
Simon Swaffield is Professor of
Landscape Architecture,
Landscape Architecture Group,
PO Box 84, Lincoln University,
Canterbury, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Telephone: +64-3-325-3804
Fax: +64-3-325-3854
Email: swaffies@lincoln.ac.nz
2
Datascapes are a potent example of this adoption of an electronic metaphor in
design, or, as Frampton put it, one of "relative impotence" (Frampton, 2003).
However, the aesthetic that has come to be associated with computer-generated
or visualised design has also been criticised for its generic, over-perfected quality.
In the fashion industry, for example, there has been a reaction against this pervasive
smoothness, with so-called deconstructed design, which is deliberately poorly
finished, with rips and tears to counter the sleek tailoring made possible by
computer-generated pattern making. A roughly finished version of landscape
architecture is seen, for example, in Peter Latz's work at Emscher Park in Duisberg,
Germany, where industrial and ecological chaos are an antidote to the frequent
subjugation of such elements in much contemporary design.
Architects Peter Zumthor and Steven Holl are bellwethers for this countering
of the dominance of the virtual, with Zumthor recently proclaiming: "We walk
on floors, goddamnit, we don't walk on images! You cannot live in a TV box.
We are here physically on earth, not virtually". He adds: "There are signs that the
body is in danger, it wants to come back! You can see this in the last 20 years in
the arts. We're living in a world of images. Substance - real stuff - has to be
emphasised" (Lane, 2004).
On one hand, therefore, the desire for the global is consuming, in all senses
of the word. The rapid dissemination of news and fashion via media networks
implodes spatial differentials and alters, forever, the nature of 'connection'. The
yearning for the global is seen in places like Singapore, where Orchard Road, the
main shopping street, is the second most vivid place for most Singaporeans (after
their homes) (Yeung and Savage, 1995: 85). They find aesthetic delight in its
symbolising of modernisation, westernisation and consumerism. Resorts
throughout South East Asia reflect the homogenising influence of "Bali Style",
applied uniformly in design, despite regional differences, while the global market
in fast food sees familiar brands turning up on every street corner in every country
... Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King .. , .
On the other hand, for many, globalisation remains a threatening spectre.
The increasing power of multinational corporations has affected the economic
and social foundations in many countries. Anger against so called free trade and
the spread of global brands is apparent in anti-globalisation campaigns around
the world. Resistance is expressed in a number of ways - including direct action
protests, campaigns for local food, and public policy recognition of local character
and heritage. According to Giddens, it is precisely a resistance to globalisation
that "is the reason for the revival of local cultural identities in different parts of
the world" (1999: 13). One profound irony is the way in which 'the local' has
acquired economic value within the global economy, as consumers seek products,
locations for their homes, and recreation activities that embody, at least
symbolically, the qualities of community and authentic experience that are
frequently destroyed through globalisation (Zimmerman, 2001).
These polarised responses to globalisation present a challenge for landscape
architecture. Globalisation is expressed and experienced in a range of areas of
LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2)
relevance to landscape architecture professionals and educators, for example, with
the ongoing push for trade liberalisation and the globalisation of products and
professional services. The education market is also a considerable area of
globalisation, or as it is perhaps more euphemistically termed, "internationalisation".
More fundamentally, the acceleration of the development of the built environment
and the changing nature of "cities" questions the currency of landscape architecture
as a profession, with the emergence of landscape urbanism as some kind of hybrid
discipline that seeks to deal with the contemporary urban condition.
Yet, while landscape urbanism might be the 'sexy' face of the dissolution of
architecture and landscape, the flips ide is the 'nowhere' of suburbia, and the
dislocated and dysfunctional juxtaposition of activity and abandonment,
investment and disinvestment, place and space that characterises contemporary
"splintering urbanism" (Graham and Marvin, 2001).
The city is everywhere; therefore there is no longer any city '" We no longer live in cities, but territories (territory from terreo, to be afraid, to feel terror?!). The very possibility of establishing the confines of the city seems inconceivable today, or, at least reduced to a purely technical administrative exercise (Cacciari, 2002: 106).
Sprawling conurbations are not limited to the 'scapes' or 'territories' of central
Europe, or the vast tracts of (sub}urbanised land in the United States. In Australia,
Brisbane is being termed the "200 km City", and in New Zealand the proliferation
of "lifestyle" blocks, or "hobby farms" is becoming known as "rural sprawl".
Dolores Hayden has a new book called A Field Guide to Sprawl in which, in the
manner of a natural history guidebook, she identifies the manifestations of the
contemporary suburban condition. She offers acronyms such as TOAD
(temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict site), and neologisms such as
Zoomburb, which is a suburb growing faster than a Boomburb. Other memorable
terms, such as "litter on a stick" for a billboard, all help to create a nomenclature
for this type of landscape (Hayden, 2004).
The quality of these vast sprawling suburbs is a real concern for landscape
architecture. As Kenneth Frampton comments in his recent piece, "Critical
Regionalism Revisited":
Not withstanding the occasional bucolic suburb, it is overwhelmingly evident that our suburbanized dystopia is fast becoming a universal late-modern condition. The chances are that little of this will ever be rebuilt or even reformulated in a culturally significant way. Urban sprawl seems to be here to stay, and apart from the possibility of modifying it on a piecemeal basis through earthwork interventions of various kinds, one can only envisage its eventual long-term ruin and abandonment. Given what has happened to the 'Brownfield' legacy of the last century - those lands left derelict by the ravages of industrialization - one can hardly be sanguine about the future demolition or restoration of sprawl (Frampton, 2003).
SIGNS OF RESISTANCE
The conflation of time and space in contemporary culture and the ever-widening
networks of global power and investment, together with the paradox of increasing
JACKY BOWRING AND SIMON SWAFFIELD 3
4
mobility to, and enhanced visibility of, places that look and feel increasingly the
same (Relph's "instant environment machine", 1976) have stimulated resistance at
a number of levels within the design disciplines. Philosophically, the growth of
interest in phenomenology emerged as a response to the overwhelming influence
of technocratic modernity. It continues as a reaction to the relativism and apparent
nihilism of post-modernity. Aligned with this has been the stubborn advocacy of
'place'. Despite the materialist critique of the notion of 'sense of place' as socially
exclusive romanticism, communities and designers repeatedly rebuild the barricades
of their physical and conceptual enclaves against the waves of global change.
A related consequence of the conceptual collapse of geographical space and
time has been a shift of focus towards the deepening of a sense of time at particular
points in space - excavating, revealing, and reinventing memory of past events
and possibilities (Lassus, 1998; Girot, 2000). As a result, there is on the one
hand a rapidly homogenising world of "universal technique" (Frampton, 1983),
while on the other, scattered but stubborn places and points of resistance.
The tension between the global and the local in landscape architecture, between
here or there, is the central problematique for the CELA 2004 conference. But
whilst the opposition of the global and the local is a conceptually appealing and
easily grasped approach to the analysis of landscape change in late modernity
(Swaffield and Primdahl, forthcoming), it falls short as a creative design or planning
strategy. As Carl Steinitz notes in his paper, the different demands and imperatives
of macro- and micro-scale change are practically and conceptually difficult to
reconcile. A simple duality between these two poles, between the macro-scale,
global space of flows and the micro-scale, local space of places (Castells, 2000)
provides an insufficient framework for the consideration of intentional landscape
change. Many educators therefore turn to another stubborn concept, that of the
region, to provide a framework for investigation, understanding and design.
HERE AND NOW: THE REGION IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Regionalism has a long academic history, dating back to the geography of Strabo.
Tzonis and Lefaivre (1996, 2003) trace its modern expression, in the sense of
self-consciously identifying with an area, to the writings of Goethe, Ruskin and
Proust. While historically appealing as a description of distinctive areas on the
surface of the earth, however, regions have a number of limitations in the current
climate of pluralistic, multiple connections and dis-connections, where not only
the nature of cities, but the nature of nature is forever changed. As Chambers
puts it, contemporary "habitats" suffer from a problem of "leakiness" (as cited in
Pratt, 1999: 154). The notion of 'difference' is no longer an adequate gauge to
determine a notion of region, when, as Clifford suggests, "difference is encountered
in adjoining neighbourhoods; and the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth"
(as cited in Pratt, 1999: 154).
Furthermore, whilst regions might arguably reflect a sense of belonging to a
cultural or language group, they can also be a deliberate political creation. Region
and nation can become synonymous, and regionalism has been tainted during
LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2)
the twentieth century with its adoption by fascism, most acutely expressed in
the "blood and soil" philosophy of the Nazi Heimat and parallel totalitarian
regimes of the 1930s (Tzonis and Lefaivre, 1996).
This very desire to feel a sense of belonging to a place can also fall victim to
the capitalist forces that drive the processes of globalisation, with the
contemporary notion of region becoming appropriated as a commodity. While
this sometimes occurs in a "bottom-up" situation, with small towns creating
'icons' of identity - the syndrome of Big Things (Australia's Big Pineapple and
Big Banana, New Zealand's Salmon and Kiwifruit, and the numerous giant figures
of the mythical lumberjack, John Bunyan, scattered across America) - there is
also a "top-down" shaping of regional symbols. As Frederic Jameson wrote in his
critique of Frampton's critical regionalism, one of the frailties of regionalism in
the era of late capitalism is the prospect of "post-Fordism". Fordism and classical
imperialism created a sense of homogeneity via the centralisation and subsequent
imposition of design products. Post-Fordism, however, uses computer technology
to customise products for individual markets. Such marketing is intended to
suggest that the companies "'respect' the values and cultures of the local
population by adapting its various goods to suit those vernacular languages and
practices" (Jameson, 1994: 255). In New Zealand we can cynically view
McDonalds's offering of the "Kiwiburger" as a deft commercial move of
condescending to a region's desire for identity. Jameson explains that what happens
is "corporations are inserted into the very heart of local and regional culture,
about which it becomes difficult to decide whether it is authentic any longer
(and indeed whether that term still means anything)" (1994: 255).
What Jameson is describing could perhaps be termed "cynical regionalism",
the pandering to local desires for identity. While we might suspect that such a
process would be confined to commodities such as hamburgers and cars, we can
also look to this in the context of landscape architecture, and landscape
architectural education. Richard Weller observes:
Landscape architecture has, as everyone knows, tapped into a profitable trade in feigning intimacy with local contexts. Sometimes this business of symbolising place might encapsulate the pride and resilience oflocal identity, but more often than not it smacks of insecurity, ideology and asphyxiated imagination (Weller, 2001: 12).
Multinational firms practising in a range of cultural settings can be particularly
guilty of a landscape post-Fordism when working in varying local situations -
the "Main Street" syndrome in which the same underlying formula is represented
in local guise. Cynical regionalism is also a reminder to educators of the need to
be self-critical in terms of internationalising education.
HERE AND THERE: CRITICAL REGIONALISM
It is against this background of regionalism as a romantic or cynical manipulation
of symbols that the idea of critical regionalism has emerged. While originating in
the field of architectural theory, critical regionalism is strongly related to landscape,
providing prospects and opportunity for a truly reflective and critical response
JACKY BOWRING AND SIMON SWAFFIELD 5
6
to the interconnections between landscape and architecture, between the global
and the local, between 'nature' and 'culture', between here and there.
Tzonis states that the "critical" in critical regionalism was derived from the
Kantian concept of critical, or a "baring, exposing and evaluation of the implicit
presuppositions of an argument, or a way of thinking" (Tzonis and Lefaivre,
2003: 21). For Frampton, the connection is more with the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School. In both cases, it implies a self-conscious reflection upon not
only the explicit relationships within a landscape, but also the underlying
relationships, and the possibility of alternatives.
CRITICAL REGIONALISM AND LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Much of the discourse on critical regionalism has been focused on architecture,
reflecting the disciplinary focus of the lead theorists. Yet the potential of the
role of landscape in the inflection of the regional is becoming recognised even
within this discourse. In his Seven Points for the Millennium: An Untimely Manifesto,
Frampton identified "landscape form as a redemptive strategy" and said he is
convinced that "architectural and planning schools throughout the world should
give much greater emphasis to the cultivation of landscape as an overarching
system rather than concentrating exclusively, as they have tended to do up to
now, on the design of buildings as aesthetic objects" (Frampton, 2000: 78). The
significance of landscape was reiterated in Frampton's recent piece, "Critical
Regionalism Revisited", where he identifies it as the "sole remaining agent capable
of mediating the chaos of the megalopolis" (2003). Tzonis and Lefaivre's recent
book, Critical Regionalism (2003), is notable for its inclusion of several landscape
designs and a number of architecture/landscape hybrids.
Our selection of the theme for CELA 2004, "Here or There: The Global and
the Local", was an explicit attempt to generate a critical discourse on the issues
of globalism and regionalism from a landscape architectural perspective. The
selection of the topic was also an acknowledgement that CELA 2004 was CELA's
first conference offshore, the first hosted outside North America. The elision of
the USA and 'global' is not uncommon in contemporary discourse in a range of
arenas, and, for many who aspire to be part of a global culture, it is frequently a
desire to buy into (literally) American culture. Here or There? is therefore a question
particularly for American educators, to prompt a critical reflection on cultural
horizons.
Although landscape is increasingly recognised within the critical regionalist
discourse, one of the challenges for pursuing a critically regionalist response in
landscape architecture has been the baggage that critical regionalism has in the
architectural context. As a buzzword in architecture schools in the 1980s it became
connected with a particular group of architects (for example, Aalto, Utzon, Botta),
and developed connotations of a romantic regionalism, however much the intent
was to avoid this. Frampton has been criticised for using "starchitects" as his
exemplars, that is to say, architects who have a high profile on the world stage,
and are just as likely to work outside their own region as within it.
LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2)
Beyond the baggage of the name, however, there remains currency in the
continued exploration of the mediation of the global and local in design, and
for our purposes, within landscape architecture. In an earlier presentation
(Swaffield and Bowring, 1999), we reviewed a number of the dimensions and
strategies identified by critical regional theorists for their relevance to landscape
architecture. Here we summarise briefly five key features of particular relevance
to the conference theme: a phenomenological stance, concern for the tactile and
the tectonic, a focus on memory, and a design strategy of de-familiarisation and
indirect borrowing.
Sensing of place: phenomenology Phenomenology is an underlying concern of critical regionalism, highlighting
the importance of direct and reflective experience in capturing the particularity
of a place and region. This, according to Frampton, is one of the means by
which design can be inflected more precisely in terms of 'place', resisting the
imposition of universal culture. A focus upon qualities that cannot be transferred
through digital hyperspace both requires and enables designers and communities
to celebrate and reassert the heterogeneity of landscape. This is well illustrated in
New Zealand by the 'problem' of ecological aesthetics, where the hegemony of
the visual and ingrained ideas of picturesque 'beauty' that came with a colonial
culture has resulted in the destruction or compromising of many ecological sites.
The picturesque still creates powerful resistance to design strategies that seek
greater indigenous ecological integrity, and a phenomenological framework that
embraces and accentuates dimensions other than the purely visual may provide
some underlying rationale of how to move beyond the dominance of 'pidgin
picturesque' aesthetics (Bowring, 1997).
Emphasising the tactile
The dominance of virtual media has reduced the sense of the tactile, in an even
more pronounced fashion than was anticipated in early writings on critical
regionalism. However, reaction or resistance to this is occurring in a range of
situations. The Venice Architecture Biennale of 2002 exemplified a shift towards
a concern with reconnecting with materiality. Architectural critic and curator
Deyan Sudjic, director for the biennale, "Next", made the following commentary:
Architecture recently has often been presented as if it were a form of installation art, or
dominated by cyber space or video. This biennale will concentrate instead on the
physical, the material and the tactile (Sudjic, 2002).
In landscape architecture, work by designers such as Shlomo Aronson illustrates
the potential of landscape materiality as a driver of a critical regionalist response,
shown, for example, through the use of stone and water to evoke the experience
of the desert wadi within a courtyard on the Ben-Gurion University campus.
Shaped by the tectonic
A closely related feature of recent landscape architecture has been the growing
understanding and celebration of deep form in landscape, illustrated well in the
"Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed/Nature Revealed" exhibit and
JACKY BOWRING AND SIMON SWAFFIELD 7
8
catalogue that was featured at the 1999 ASLNCELA meeting. In particular,
advocates for a shift from passive 'scenic' aesthetics to dynamic 'ecological'
aesthetics (Gobster, 1999) emphasise the need to create landscape patterns that
express and respond to underlying ecological and hydrological processes with
elegance and inspiration. But it is important to recognise that deep landscape
forms may be both inherited from nature (for example, valley systems, floodways)
and actively shaped from an understanding of process (The Emerald Necklace,
for example).
Furthermore, in the modern metropolis, resilient deep form can also be created
through cultural interventions - the Copenhagen Finger Plan both directed
development and created space for new forests in the interstices. One of the
more innovative recent projects in New Zealand has been the way that the
Wetlands and Waterways Unit in Christchurch City Council has utilised a city
wide Asset Management Strategy to promote the ecological restoration of formerly
piped and channelled watercourses as new linking elements within an expanding
city (see Swaffield and Primdahl, forthcoming).
Borrowing indirectly
Tzonis and Lefaivre (2003) refer to indirect borrowing. A New Zealand example
of what this might mean, which is also of relevance in its reference to a synthesis
of architecture and landscape, is Andrew Patterson's Summer House in Auckland,
which turns away from the superficial indicators of indigenous architecture (such
as carving and materials), towards the concept of the marae. A marae is a meeting
ground, and is central to Maori and Polynesian cultures as a place of peace,
debate, reconciliation and cultural creativity. In designing this inner-city house,
Patterson used the model of the marae to create a sense of inward space within
the hostile surroundings of the city. The materials and aesthetic are part of an
international vocabulary, while the cultural syntax is of the region. Ypma describes
how from the outside the house "when closed has the appearance of an impervious
'shed' with no doors, windows or openings of any description ... a fortress in
aluminium planking" (Ypma, 1996: 144-145). But this unwelcoming fa<;:a:de
gives way to a courtyard open to the sky, including a swimming pool, and "a
series of monolithic structures, also very much part of Polynesian tradition,
standing guard around this 'modern marae'" (Ypma, 1996: 149).
Here and then: issues of memory and nostalgia The desire for a deepening of memory in place was noted earlier as a characteristic
act of resistance to globalisation, but, as demonstrated, it can be fraught with
pitfalls. One of the antithetical poles of Frampton's critical regionalism was the
nostalgic, for its connotations of a sentimental, romantic regionalism. This is a
difficult area to traverse, yet it remains of significance when speaking of connecting
with place. Nigel Thrift (1999) discusses the phenomenological experience of place,
and refers to the notion of "competencies"., which are the source of the hauntings
that give a place feeling. With reference to memory he relates Derrida's concept of
the" cinder", something that testifies to the fire, but is there as a remainder.
LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2)
Sebastien Marot's recent book, Sub-urbanism and the Art of Memory, emphasises
a concern with memory as a source of identity in contemporary design. Marot
asserts:
The century of expanding cities has passed. Ours is now the time of deepening territories.
Modern nomadism will be no more successful than the simulacra ofliteral memory in
making bearable the flattening-out of places and their increasing conformity. The
earth has become too small for us even to dream of not exploring, everywhere, its
fourth dimension (Marot, 2003: 86).
This is perhaps a sense of reconnecting to the sense of occupation in a region
(Olwig, 2002), a return to the concerns of landschaft, or the occupied milieu,
rather that a concern with landskip, the visual landscape. Landschaft signals a means
of overcoming the "lite regionalism" that is produced by a reliance on icons of
regionalism, rather than those more indirect aspects of a place. As Corner notes:
"The emphasis shifts from object appearances to processes of formulation,
dynamics of occupancy, and the poetics of becoming" (1999: 159). This shift is
very evident in many of the papers presented at CELA 2004.
THE PUBLISHED PAPERS
The papers are published in order of presentation, as the sequence reflects the
structure and progress of the conference itself. The first three offer diverse responses
to the challenge set by the conference theme. Robert Thayer argues for a radical
resistance to globalisation. In "Sustainable City Regions: Re-localising Landscapes
in a Globalising World", he presents a series of different, possible scenarios of
the future and argues for the bioregional approach, in which regions become
self-organising systems defined by their ecological function as well as their human
history. Thayer's arguments are illustrated largely by reference to his adopted
home of Northern California.
In contrast, Rod Barnett aligns his philosophical position with the paradigm
of landscape urbanism. In "Artweb: A Nonlinear Model for Urban Development"
he advocates a synthesis of architecture and landscape - a cyborg perhaps born of
digital technology and ecology - that celebrates the transient and contingent
nature of contemporary cities. Nonetheless, the particular project reported by
Barnett (in Auckland, New Zealand) is based upon real interventions into the
urban fabric, and in the telling, at least, retains a sense of groundedness.
Mira Engler tackles the (im)morality of global technology head on, with a detailed
examination of the challenges and potentials in dealing with the aftermath of military
technology that is literally global in its reach, and potentially global in its effects.
"Post-nuclear Monuments, Museums and Gardens" offers a form of redemption
. through engagement with the redundant landscapes of nuclear testing in the United
States Midwest. By analogy, the argument states that it is not possible to resist
globalisation by withdrawal into an enclave: it must be directly confronted.
Joan Woodward deals with 'waste' landscapes of a different scale and with
very different dynamics. Working in Southern California, she reports on analyses
JACKY BOWRING AND SIMON SWAFFIELD 9
10
of the way in which abandoned urban landscapes - including parks and gardens
- act as sites in which introduced species can adapt and establish new hybrid
ecologies. "Letting Los Angeles Go: Lessons from Feral Landscapes" celebrates
the exotic, rather than the indigenous, and at the conference clearly challenged
many long-held positions. But, as Woodward points out, the human ecology of
Southern California is profoundly 'exotic' and already dominates the landscape.
Recognition of the potential of exotic flora that has come with the human colonists
is long overdue.
The next two papers focus on education. In "Rhetoric and Reality: The
Internationalisation of Education as Experienced in the Cross-cultural and Cross
disciplinary Studio", Catherin Bull reports and reflects upon the programme
operated by Melbourne University in conjunction with partners in Thailand and
France, through which graduate students and faculty exchange and work
collaboratively across three continents. A key lesson here is the need for very carefully
refined objectives and teaching strategies. Amy Archambeau and Pat Taylor explore
a different dimension of globalisation. In "The Future of Academic Statistics:
Boon or Bane?" they analyse some implications of the seemingly relentless drive by
university administrators for comparative metrics of staff and student performance.
This aspect of globalisation has received little attention, but in effect it represents
the application of universal management and accounting techniques across different
cultures and countries, and Archambeau and Taylor offer guidance on how landscape
educators can use these comparisons constructively.
The final two papers illustrate the key point made by Carl Steinitz that there
cannot be single solutions for all scales. Linda Jewell offers an inspiring account
of the way in which landscape architects, who were working well before either
'globalisation' or 'critical regionalism' had been conceptualised, developed
methods of working that highlighted the tactile qualities of site. The examples
shown in "On-site Insight: The Merits of Facilitating Incremental Design Decisions
in the Field" resonate powerfully with contemporary theoretical directions, but
pose major challenges in terms of current contract and employment practice.
In the final plenary, Carl Steinitz illustrated why he is one of the leading
educators in CELA. Drawing upon several previous papers and presentations, he
crafts a compelling case for design and planning strategies that are sensitive to the
possibilities for intervention, with differing emphases at different scales. "From
Project to Global: On Landscape Planning and Scale" is an important reminder
that the global and the local constitutes not only a relationship of space and
time, but also of levels of control and flexibility.
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LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2)
Cacciari, M (2002) Nomads in Prison, Casabella, 705, pp 4-7 (English summary pp 104-106).
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LANDSCAPE REVIEW VOLUME 9(2)
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